Lauren Willig - The Secret History of the Pink Carnation

“There was someone. Someone I fancied myself in love with. A long time ago.”

Amy swallowed the impulse to demand sarcastically if this nameless someone had been more than a mere infatuation. She wondered if he’d kissed her on moonlit nights on the Seine. If he’d taken her to see his antiquities. If she’d been prettier and wittier than Amy. If she’d been blond.

“Who was she?”

Richard shrugged. “The daughter of neighboring gentry.” He paused, trying to think how to go on. For all that the images of Deirdre’s betrayal and Tony’s death were emblazoned into his brain in precise detail, he’d never actually had to put any of it into words before. Those who knew, knew. Geoff, Miles, Sir Percy, his parents . . . None of them had ever taxed him with an explanation. They just knew. And they never discussed it.

“I fancied myself in love with her,” he repeated, as if by focusing on the foolishness of the lovelorn swain he had been, he could put off the other part, the darker part. “It was nearly six years ago.”

“Are you still in love with her?” Amy croaked.

Richard’s head snapped down towards Amy. “In love with her? Zounds, no! It was . . .”

“An infatuation?”

The sarcasm was wasted on Richard. “An infatuation,” he agreed. “She was young, pretty, and nearby. I was impressionable.”

Amy sniffed scornfully.

“I had a rival. A middle-aged widower. I’d been running missions for Percy for just over a year. I thought that if I told her . . . Hell, I was bursting to tell her. To tell anyone. I was young, and stupid, and I wanted to boast. Even if Baron Jerard hadn’t been involved, I would have told Deirdre about the League sooner or later.”

Deirdre. The name somehow made the woman more real to Amy. Deirdre. It was a nasty name, Amy decided viciously, despite the fact that she’d heretofore always rather liked it, and when she was ten had given the name to her third-favorite doll.

“Her maid was a French operative.”

Amy’s eyes flew up to his face in surprise.

With the grim air of a man running a gauntlet, Richard plunged on. “I made the mistake of telling Deirdre, in some detail, of a mission we had planned for the following month. Her maid alerted the Ministry of Police. They preceded us to our meeting place.”

“Were you hurt?”

“I?” Richard laughed bitterly. “Not a scratch. They arrived at the cabin just before T—one of our best men showed up with a French count he had rescued from the Bastille. By the time Geoff and I arrived, the count was recaptured. Tony was dead. I was unhurt. It didn’t take long to trace the link to Deirdre.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“So was I.” Richard shook his head. “But that didn’t make any difference to Tony.”

Remembered grief incised deep lines on either side of Richard’s lips, and chiseled away at Amy’s anger. It had seemed so straightforward just moments before. He had wronged her. He had played her for a fool. He was in the wrong, and no excuse, no excuse at all (short of memory loss, or an evil twin) was going to set that right. When he mentioned Deirdre, Amy had bristled with righteous indignation. It would have been so easy to scoff at a betrayed love, to fling shrill derision at him like poison-tipped arrows.

Even knowing the rest of it, part of Amy still wanted to fly at him like a harpy, and screech, “That was it? You played games with my heart because another woman—a woman who was not me—betrayed your trust years ago? You made my life agony for that?”

But she couldn’t.

Not when his remorse hung between them like a living thing. Or did she mean like a dead thing? Tony.

“But I’m not Deirdre,” she blurted out.

“I couldn’t tell you, Amy,” Richard said quietly. “There were too many lives at stake.”

Amy stared at him dumbly. You didn’t have to dally with me, she thought. You could have just left me alone. Or you could have trusted me. I wouldn’t have told. She desperately rehearsed all the grievances that had fueled her since that afternoon she had realized his double identity. But all of them scattered in the face of those horrible, weighty words, too many lives at stake.

Amy shook her head and took a step back. “I can’t . . . ,” she began, but choked on her own confusion.

How could she say she couldn’t accept that, when she knew he was right, that he had done the honorable thing? Her hurt feelings were insignificant when weighed in the balance against a man’s life. She knew that. A line from one of her favorite poems flitted through her head: “I could not love thee dear so much, loved I not honor more.” It had always seemed such a noble sentiment. But here the sentiment stood embodied before her, and Amy wanted to scream and rail. How had everything turned upside down? Five minutes ago, he was a rogue, and a deceiver, and she a maiden wronged. Now, Amy’s head ached with the uneasy sense of being wrong rather than wronged.

But he hurt me, her heart argued back.

Why couldn’t he have been the despicable cad he seemed, so she could just hate him? None of these horrible, messy, confused emotions.

“I’m going home,” she said thickly.

Richard immediately stepped forward. “I’ll see you back.”

“No.” Amy shook her head as she flung her legs recklessly over the side of the window. She wanted to walk and walk and go on walking as though, if she moved quickly enough, she might outpace the confused thoughts that pursued and pricked her.

“No,” she repeated, “I’ll be all ri—aaaaah!”

Amy’s words turned into an agitated cry as a pair of hands closed around her midriff and jerked her down from the window.

“Let go!” Amy drove an elbow into her captor’s arm, earning a muffled oof. In retaliation, the arm around her stomach tightened. Amy gasped for breath, ineffectually trying to kick backwards, as she was hauled inexorably into the alleyway behind Delaroche’s lodgings.

Richard flung himself out of the window after her in a swirl of black cape—and froze, as a phalanx of military men materialized out of the darkness. The brass on their uniforms might have been somewhat dull in the dark, but it didn’t take much moonlight to see that their muskets were primed and ready.

A short, bandy-legged man strutted through the semicircle of musket points. “The Purple Gentian, I presume?” Delaroche sneered.

“Unhand her,” Richard snapped.

He knew he had made a tactical error when Delaroche’s smile widened. “Such a touching tête-à-tête,” the little man crooned. “And so very . . . convenient.”

Fifteen men. Richard rapidly assessed the situation. Fifteen burly infantrymen crowded into the little alleyway behind Delaroche’s lodgings. Of those fifteen, fully three were occupied in subduing Amy. A shako hat rolled through the dust as Amy rammed into one of her captors, sending him reeling. Another darted back and forth, trying to avoid Amy’s flailing feet as he wound a rope around her wrists. A third still held her around the waist, but his nose oozed blood onto his white cross straps from a well-placed butt of Amy’s head.

Which only left twelve infantrymen pointing muskets at Richard.

“Move,” cautioned Delaroche, “and my men will shoot the charming Miss Balcourt.”

Twelve muskets hastily shifted target.

“You’re warring on women now, Delaroche?” Richard didn’t have to feign the disgust in his voice. “Needed to find someone smaller than you to beat up on, did you?”

“Insults will not alter your predicament, my friend.” Delaroche smirked. “You fell into my trap, just as I knew you would.”

“Trap?” Amy gasped.

“Trap,” Delaroche repeated smugly. “Every man has a weakness, Monsieur Purple Gentian. For some, it is drink. For others, it is cards. For—”

“Is the treatise on human nature really quite necessary?” Richard interjected, glancing sidelong at Amy. The rope had finally made its way around her arms.

“For you,” Delaroche continued, as though Richard had never spoken, “it is a woman. That woman.”

“She has nothing to do with this, Delaroche.”

“Oh no, Monsieur Purple Gentian? She led you to me. Just as I knew she would.”

“No!” Amy squirmed in her captor’s grasp. “I wouldn’t—” Her words ended abruptly as a heavy hand clamped down over her mouth. A masculine yelp followed as the guard snatched his bitten palm away from her mouth.

Horrified comprehension swept through Amy. That groom of Delaroche’s, that smirking, spotty boy, who had been so forthcoming in telling her exactly when his master would be out of his chambers. Amy doubled over, feeling sick for reasons that had nothing to do with the bulky arm clamped around her ribs.

Richard forced his body to relax, forced himself to wave a languid hand in Amy’s direction. “Quite a fuss over a bit of fluff.”

“A bit of fluff?”

Richard studiedly avoided Amy’s eyes, hoping to hell that she would realize what he was trying to do. “A light-skirt,” he clarified, in his best man-about-town air of bored sophistication, “a mere spot of dalliance. Don’t you French know something about that sort of thing? Or did you lose your talent for amours along with your monarchy?”

“A mere spot of dalliance,” Delaroche repeated, turning the unfamiliar English words scornfully on his tongue. “Or so you claim. We have ways of testing the truth of your words. Pierre?”

A heavy hand crashed against Amy’s face, snapping her head back. Amy gasped in surprise and pain.

“Antoine?”

Metal gleamed at Amy’s throat. A knife.

“He is under orders to use it,” Delaroche said softly. “A bit of fluff, you say?”

A strangled yelp emerged from Amy’s throat as the knife pressed against her skin, raising a thin red welt.

“What do you want?” Richard asked grimly.

“That, Monsieur Gentian, ought to be obvious.”

“Not to all of us,” Richard snapped.

“Your confession and surrender.”

“Don’t!” Amy cried out. “Don’t do it! You’ve made a mistake, Monsieur Delaroche! He doesn’t care for me. Really! It’s not worth—urgh! Keep your bloody hand off my mouth! Owwwww . . .”

“On one condition!” Richard’s voice rang out over Amy’s cries. The soldiers holding her froze. “You leave the girl alone. Otherwise there’s no deal. No confession. No surrender. I want your solemn word, Delaroche, that the girl will be left here. Unharmed.”

Delaroche nodded. “Unharmed.” The knife fell away from Amy’s throat, and the hands yanking her bound arms behind her back slackened.

The little Frenchman’s eyes gleamed with triumph. “Your mask, Gentian.”

Richard’s hands went to the lacings of his black mask.

“No!” Amy protested, as his gloved fingers plucked at the knot. “You mustn’t!”

Amy pulled against the arms holding her, frantic to get to Richard before he could reveal his identity once and for all to Delaroche. She couldn’t let him do it! She couldn’t let him lose everything, all that he had worked and fought for and perhaps his life into the bargain, all because of her. If he did . . . Amy’s stomach lurched as the knot gave and the strings loosened. If he did, she would be worse than Deirdre.

The mask tumbled to the ground.

An inarticulate murmur of distress rose from Amy’s throat, inordinately loud in the hushed silence that had swept the alleyway. All eyes were riveted on Richard’s pale face in the moonlight, on the straight line of his nose, the cool glimmer of his green eyes, the gilded gleam of his hair as he pushed back the hood of his cape, all the features that marked him damningly and irrevocably as Lord Richard Selwick, enemy of the French Republic.

“You can still run!” Amy cried desperately. “You don’t have to do this, Richard!”

One by one, his black gloves joined his mask on the ground. His long, slim fingers, now bare, went to the frogs holding his cloak closed. Sweeping off the garment, Richard sketched an ironic bow.

“Here I am, Delaroche. Unmasked, unveiled, and at your service. Now release the girl.”

With a snap of Delaroche’s fingers, Amy tumbled, still bound, to the dirt. Using her shackled wrists as leverage, she scooted painfully towards Richard. Desperately, she tried to come up with a plan. If she could create a distraction . . . a fire, maybe? Only she had nothing with which to create fire, even if her hands had been free. Jane! Why wasn’t Jane doing anything! Amy knew she was back there in the shadows, hiding and waiting, biding her time as only Jane could bide, but why oh why couldn’t she just do something? Fling a match, cry murder, stumble in pretending to be a drunken manservant, anything!